In schools where curricular constraints and testing pressures narrow the ways in which students can take up identities as writers, longterm enrichment programs offer opportunities for the meaningful design of compositions. This paper, which presents the work of four elementary student participants in a writing workshop, shows how qualitative inquiry--in particular critical multimodal analysis--can enable a teacher researcher to see, interpret, and explain what might be going on in the writings and drawings of students, and how these illuminations help establish and expand the identities of students as writers. I focus especially on the work of one student over three years, and share the methodological procedures I drew upon in order to generate claims about his writing identity. (Contains 2 footnotes.)